Video: McCain’s and Palin’s first joint town hall

She took on: her party’s state chairman, her party’s state attorney general, GOP Gov. Frank Murkowski’s tainted gas pipeline project, and then she supported a GOP candidate who ran against Alaska’s “untouchable” GOP congressional earmarker, Don Young.

One way or another, each episode involved severing the sleazy ties that bind public officials to grasping commercial interests, something even the Democratic left purports to favor.

It isn’t just Washington and Juneau. You could open the nozzle on the same reform fire hose to wash the public-private slime out of the capital hallways of New York, New Jersey, California, Illinois and onward.

You say Sarah Palin doesn’t have enough “experience” to run Washington? Washington is barely fit to be run.

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Unfocused “reform” rhetoric from Mr. McCain isn’t enough. The public has been there, heard that. Sen. McCain should talk about what he knows — fat Fannie and Freddie, farm-bill bloat, the ethanol subsidy fiasco, the federal procurement mess. Show people Gov. Palin’s 18 single-spaced pages of 2007 vetoes. Then identify Congress’s bipartisan supporters of the Legislative Line-Item Veto Act and ask the voters’ support. Appear with GOP congressman from Sarah’s new generation who want to help — Eric Cantor of Virginia, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Kevin McCarthy of California. There are others.

Promise to spend the first two years on this historic political reform effort, and if a Democratic Congress laughs, promise to barnstorm in 2010 for a Congress willing to act, from any party.

One hears talk of John McCain’s temper. My guess is voters want someone to lose it with Washington, big time. Oh, and he should ask what’s the difference between a reformist pit bull and a six-term senator. It isn’t lipstick.
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Henninger is spot on for the most part, it seems to me — but he misses making a key observation: part of the strategy Democrats have been employing, with their attacks on Palin’s “qualifications” and on her small town roots, is to turn her into a hickish hootchie momma playing a sad reindeer rag on the spoons — not simply to assuage their own elitist egos (though that part, along with their loathing of the snowbilly doublewides and their moose-infested backwood burb — one that nonetheless needs their protection, less its pristine beauty is destroyed by those who, you know, inexplicably live there), but to preemptively downplay the importance of the reforms for which she’s responsible.

Sure, li’l miss PTA fixed a few “Alaskan problems,” the subtext suggests. But Alaska is barely even part of the US, and in Washington, Palin won’t be going up against drunken Inuits lobbying for Sunday happy hours, but rather she’ll be among the “political class,” people with law degrees and Ivy League educations who’ve spent years being groomed to say nothing at all while pretending to address problems and issues.

And really, how can she even hope to compete?